The people have spoken
I can’t remember which politician was supposed to have said ‘The people have spoken – the bastards!’, but the Irish electorate certainly got stuck in last Thursday.
It was one of those elections which showed the gap between opinion-formers and the rest of the country. As someone who was supporting Labour I didn’t want to express my reservations before polling day, but constituency profiles made me realise the extent of previous Fianna Fáil support on the ground. I read Bertie’s explanation for having been given money to refurbish and pay stamp duty for a house he didn’t own, so that he could subsequently buy it, and wished I had friends like that. But even if there had been widespread concern about his behaviour, which there wasn’t, it had to be balanced against all the local TDs, councillors and party workers delivering the goodies for people in the constituencies.
Before polling day, it seemed right for Fine Gael and Labour to focus on the quality and efficiency of public services. And indeed Fine Gael did do better than in 2002. But I remembered the British elections of the 1980s, where people would claim they wanted to vote for better services and would even say in opinion polls that they would be prepared to pay more taxes, and then would go out and vote for Margaret Thatcher again. It’s hard for opposition parties to convince the electorate that they could manage the economy better, but with hindsight perhaps they should have tried.
There was also the impact of the leaders’ debates and other TV appearances. I thought Pat Rabbitte did well in the Green/ Labour/ Sinn Féin/ PD debate. I’m sure the tactical error made by SF in putting up a badly briefed member of another Parliament was one reason why they lost seats, along with a drift back to Fianna Fáil and a dislike of gangsters with criminal records in government. But Enda Kenny wasn’t convincing against Ahern on the following night, and from that point the feeling that the opposition might get the numbers began to slip away. In the end, the election was won on track record.
So between now and June 14th a new coalition has to be negotiated. Right now it looks as if it’ll consist of FF, the PDs, several Independents, and perhaps the Greens. Labour, the PDs and Sinn Féin have some serious thinking to do about electoral strategy. And if the Irish people are happy with one party government as long as the economy holds up, it’ll be interesting to see what happens if the good times don’t carry on until 2012.
2 comments:
Green vote held up well. Good to see Sinn Fein’s ‘unstoppable march to power’ halted as voters finally seem to have realised they don’t stand for much. I’m also glad to see the back of McDowell and his cronies.
But my big concern is Labour and Labour needs to think hard in the coming weeks and months about where the future lies. Its sad if the party’s best prospect in the coming years is to simply make up the numbers in a series of centre right led administrations. I think this election should be used as a watershed after a decade of languishing with the same number of seats. Ideally I would love to see Labour as the main opposition party, but that looks like a far off dream at the moment with the FG resurgence. Maybe its time to ‘think big’ again. Or at the very least no more pre election pacts. Can you imagine how Labour would look if Rabbitte led them into coalition with FF at this stage?
I agree about the task facing Labour, and your own post on the subject is very interesting. I do think there needs to be some ideological clarity about where they are going (strong economy and high quality public services IMO, a kind of 3rd way without the spin and with added civil liberties) but the same applies to SF and the Greens.
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